3 posts tagged “poetry”
I'm racing my way up to page 43 so far (it's been 5 months). It's funny, his poems are so image intensive, I never really know how to read, say, 20 at one sitting. That said, here's one of the three I read this morning--its images have some real gems:
Spanish Dancer
As on all its sides a kitchen-match darts white
flickering tongues before it bursts into flame:
with the audience around her, quickened, hot,
her dance begins to flicker in the dark room.
And all at once it is completely fire.
One upward glance and she ignites her hair
and, whirling faster and faster, fans her dress
into passionate flames, till it becomes a furnace
from which, like startled rattlesnakes, the long
naked arms uncoil, aroused and clicking.
And then: as if the fire were too tight
around her body, she takes and flings it out
haughtily, with an imperious gesture,
and watches: it lies raging on the floor,
still blazing up, and the flames refuse to die--.
Till, moving with total confidence and a sweet
exultant smile, she looks up finally
and stamps it out with powerful small feet.
----
Lovely! The image of her arms as startled rattlesnakes, aroused and clicking, is very nice.
O ye who have your eyeballs vext and tir'd,
Feast them upon the wideness of the sea.
O ye whose ears are dinned with uproar rude,
Or fed too much with cloying melody--
Sit ye near some old cavern's mouth and brood
Until ye start, as if the sea nymphs quired."
I picked up a collection of Keats' poetry, as I've been attracted to his delicate sensibility. So far, I'm finding his language too dense, but there are these brief glimpses, these moments that are really nice. This passage from his poem On the Sea really captures the solace of the ocean for me. I often just sit and stare at the waves, deeply relaxed by the simplicity, uniformity, calmness of a visual landscape with only one feature, rather than the visual riot of most of the modern
experience.
Poetry speaks to all people, it is said,
but here I would like to adddress
only those in my own time zone,
this proper slice of longitude
that runs from pole to snowy pole
down the globe through Montreal to Bogota.Oh, fellow inhabitants of this singular band,
sitting up in your many beds this morning--
the sun falling through the windows
and casting a shadow on the sundial--
consider those in other zones who cannot hear these words.They are not slipping into a bathrobe as we are,
or following the smell of coffee in a timely fashion.Rather, they are at work already,
leaning on copy machines,
hammering nails into a house-frame.They are not swallowing a vitamin like us;
rather they are smoking a cigarette under a half moon,
even jumping around on a dance floor,
or just now sliding under the covers,
pulling down the little chains on their bed lamps...."
